‘Intermediate-term momentum is positive, and short-term momentum is improving. Relative strength versus bitcoin has turned up, but seems fragile,’ says Fairlead’s Katie Stockton
The Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures overall inflation of the U.S. dollar, rose 0.8% in April, capping off the largest 12-month jump in prices since the period ending September 2008 after the beginning of the Great Recession.
Panic-buying and fuel-hoarding after the recent outage of the Colonial Pipeline network is the cause of the US gasoline price spike, according to the chairman of Alfa Energy John Hall.
The nation’s two largest crude oil distillation units were shuttered on Sunday after it was reported that the Colonial Pipeline had suffered an “outage.”
U.S. consumer prices have soared above economists’ predictions and by the most in more than a decade, as fiscal stimulus and booming demand pushed against supply constraints, potentially fueling market fears of a prolonged bout of higher inflation.
The Labor Department reported Wednesday that the Consumer Price Index, a measure of prices paid for goods and services, including housing and energy costs, rose 4.2% from where it was a year ago. Economists had predicted only a 3.6% increase. Inflation rose by 0.8% in April vs. the expected 0.2% increase.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently took a stand against strategies surrounding the coronavirus. In a speech on the Senate floor Monday, the Republican condemned the current policies of Democrats while suggesting they are untimely.
US electric car producer Tesla has reportedly held off on plans to buy land to expand its plant in the Chinese province of Shanghai and turn it into the company’s global export hub, as uncertainty over US-China relations grows.
Commodity traders have booked at least six tankers – provisionally – to start shipping gasoline from Europe to the US in the wake of the outage of the Colonial Pipeline network, Reuters reports, citing data from Refinitiv.
With fears growing that the Colonial shutdown could last for much longer than initially expected, with some analysts warning that a 5-day shutdown could lead to sharply higher prices, and the Biden admin activating a state of emergency to make sure that critical gasoline supplies continue to flow up the eastern seaboard, moments ago Colonial Pipeline issued an update on its attempts to restore operations, saying that "segments of our pipeline are being brought back online in a stepwise fashion" and that the goal now is to "substantially" restore operational service by the end of the week.
